Latest news with #EdwardAshton
Scientific American
22-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
How One Astronomer Helped to Discover Nearly 200 Moons of Saturn
A mere decade ago, astronomers knew of just 62 moons around Saturn. Today the ringed planet boasts a staggering 274 official satellites. That's more than any other world in the solar system—and far too many for most people to keep track of. Astronomer Edward Ashton is no exception, even though he has helped to discover 192 of them—he thinks that's the total, anyway, after pausing to do some mental math. Ashton is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. He fell into hunting for Saturn's moons in 2018, when his then academic adviser suggested the project for his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. It has been a fruitful search. Most recently, in March, Ashton and his colleagues announced a batch of 128 newfound Saturnian satellites. Scientific American spoke with Ashton about the science of discovering so many relatively tiny moons—most of them just a few kilometers wide—using vast amounts of data gathered by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), located in Hawaii. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. [ An edited transcript of the interview follows.] How have you found these moons? To detect the moons, we use a technique known as shifting and stacking. We take 44 sequential images of the same patch of sky over a three-hour period because, in that time frame, the moons move relative to the stars at a rate similar to Saturn. If we just stack the images normally, then the moon appears as a streak across the images, and that dilutes the signal of the moon. So what we do is: we shift the images relative to one another at multiple different rates near that of Saturn, and then we basically blink between the different shift rates. If the shift rate is not quite at the rate of the moon, then it's going to be slightly elongated. As you get closer to the rate of the moon, then it slowly combines into a dot. And then, as you get faster than the moon's rate, it expands again. So basically, we look at the images and then quickly blink through the different rates, and you can see the moon coalescing. That's for a single night. But just seeing an object moving at a Saturn-like rate near Saturn doesn't guarantee that it is a moon. It's highly likely that the object is a moon, but that hasn't been confirmed. So what we need to do is track the objects to show that they are in orbit around the planet. To do that, we repeat the [shift and stack] process multiple times over many months and years. Why did this happen now? Did you need new techniques and observatories to do this work? The technique and the technology have been there for a while—the same technique has been used to find moons of Neptune and Uranus. But the sky area around those planets where moons can exist is a lot smaller, so it takes less time to search through the data. One of the reasons why this hadn't been done for Saturn is because it's very time-consuming. Why do those other planets have less space where moons could be than Saturn does? Those planets are less massive, so the stable orbits that moons can have are smaller. I had been wondering if this technique works for other planets, and clearly the answer is yes. But do you think there are other moons that have yet to be found around Saturn or other planets with the method? We did find moon candidates around Saturn that we weren't able to track long enough to be able to confirm them. So if you redo this technique again, you will be able to find more moons around Saturn, but this is a case of diminishing returns. If you use a larger telescope [than the CFHT], then you'd be able to see fainter moons, so you'd be able to find more. At the moment, if you use the same technique for Jupiter, you will be able to find fainter moons. The problem is: the amount of sky that moons of Jupiter can occupy is significantly larger than [the amount of sky that can be occupied by moons of] Saturn, so the method is even more time-consuming for Jupiter. And Jupiter is much brighter than Saturn and the other planets, so there's a lot of scattered light that makes it harder to see the moons. So it's even harder to find satellites around Jupiter, and as you mentioned, other groups have already done this work for Uranus and Neptune. Does that mean we're sort of 'maxed out' on moons until we have better observations? Yeah, you probably have to wait until better technology comes along. Is there something being built or planned right now that could be that 'better technology'? There currently are telescopes that can see deeper [than the CFHT], such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The problem is: JWST's field of view is very small, so you have to do quite a few observations to be able to cover the required area. But there is a telescope that's set to launch pretty soon, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, that has quite a large field of view. So that'll be a good telescope to use for hunting more moons. What do we know about these new moons? You basically can only get the moons' orbits and approximate sizes. But if you look at the distribution of the orbits, you can understand a bit more about the history of the system. Moons that are sort of clumped together in orbital space are most likely the result of a collision, so you can see what moons come from the same parent object. Is seeing so many moons around Saturn unusual? What's unusual is how many there are. It appears that the planets have more or less equal numbers of the larger moons. But when you get down to the smaller ones that we're discovering, Saturn seems to shoot up in terms of the numbers. So that's quite interesting. This could just be because there was a recent collision within the Saturnian system that produced a large number of fragments. Do you get to name them all? Do you have to name them all? I guess I don't have to. Some of these new moons, they've been linked back to observations by a different group from more than 10 years ago. That's maybe 20 to 30 of them. For the rest, we get full discovery credit, which, I think, means we get the right to name them. But they can't be named just yet; first, they're just given a number when they have a high-precision orbit, and I'm not sure how long that's going to take. Do you have more moon-hunting observations to analyze? No, I'm taking a little break from moons! I've got other projects to work on, relating to trans-Neptunian objects. They're quite far away. They're hard to see. There are some mysteries about them at the moment. It's interesting to understand their structure and how it relates to planet formation.
Time of India
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17' gets streaming release date
Oscar-winning 'Parasite' director 's ' Mickey 17 ' is all set to make its global streaming debut on Max on May 23. The film will debut on HBO linear on Saturday, May 24, reported Deadline. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, 'Mickey 17' adapts the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. 'Mickey 17' is Bong's first feature since 'Parasite', which became the highest-grossing Korean film in history, as well as the first non-English language movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars. The film is adapted from Edward Ashton's 2022 novel, described by publisher St. Martin Press as a high-concept cerebral thriller in the vein of 'The Martian' and 'Dark Matter'. Robert Pattinson plays an "expendable" -- a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonise an ice planet, who refuses to let his replacement clone take his place. Each time he dies, his consciousness is transferred into a new, cloned body, allowing him to continue his perilous duties. The plot thickens when he comes face to face with his successor, the identical-looking Mickey 18. The story follows unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), who has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job.. . to die, for a living, as per Deadline. The film also stars , Naomi Ackie, and Mark Ruffalo. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner produced it alongside director Bong and Dooho Choi, with , Jesse Ehrman, Peter Dodd and Marianne Jenkins executive producing, reported Deadline.
Gulf Weekly
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Weekly
Perilous journey
SCI-FI black comedy film Mickey 17 is out now in theatres. Based on the science fiction novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, the movie follows Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a man who joins a space colony as an 'expandable', a disposable worker selected for dangerous tasks, who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes, with his memories remaining intact. However, things go wrong with one regeneration! This is South Korean director Bong Joon Ho's third English language production. He is best known for his 2019 black comedy thriller Parasite, which was the first foreign film to win the Best Picture honour at the 2020 Academy Awards. Speaking about working on films that aren't in his native language, Bong said in an interview, 'I had a co-writer or dialogue-polishing writer for those projects. Mostly I relied heavily on the actors in regards to the language of the film. With Mickey 17, it was Rob.' 'I relied heavily on Rob. He has such a unique and amazing linguistic sensibility. Especially with Mickey 18 (a character in the film), he improvised a lot of really fun dialogue, a lot of which was not scripted. 'It was another great lesson in realising that you need to work with amazing actors to overcome, I guess, what you can call a 'linguistic handicap' I have, where it's not my native language. It's working with very trusted actors and also a great translator,' he added. The director also revealed that he has been working on an animation film since 2019 that includes a crew of more than 100 artists. 'It's a really unique story about deep sea creatures that features very adorable creature protagonists,' he said. 'We also have human characters. It's a very unique CGI animated film, and it's really going. It's under works now. 2027, maybe,' he revealed.
The Independent
08-04-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Saturn has 128 more moons than astronomers previously thought
Earlier this week, Saturn gained a whopping 128 new official moons, as the International Astronomical Union recognised discoveries from a team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The sixth planet from the Sun now has a grand total of 274 moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System. The discovery has raised a lot of questions. How do you spot moons, and why hadn't anybody seen these ones already? Doesn't Jupiter have the most moons? What are they going to call all these moons? Are there more out there? And what exactly makes something a moon, anyway? These new discoveries cement Saturn's place as the winner of the Solar System's moon competition, with more confirmed moons than all of the other planets combined. But it hasn't always been this way. Jupiter's four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were the first ever discovered orbiting another planet. They were spotted by Galileo Galilei more than 400 years ago, in 1610. Saturn's first known moon, Titan, was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens 45 years later. The new batch of 128 moons was discovered by stacking images from the Canada France Hawaii telescope. Some of Saturn's other moons were discovered by space voyages, and some during what are called 'ring-plane crossings'. When the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed by Saturn, it took images that were used to discover the moon Atlas. The Cassini Mission later discovered seven new Saturnian moons. A ring-crossing is where Saturn's rings seem to disappear from our point of view here on Earth. This is when Saturn is at just the right angle so we're looking at the rings exactly side-on (that is, when we can only see the edge of the rings). Titan was discovered during a ring-plane crossing, and so were 12 other moons. Saturn's rings will be edge-on twice in 2025, in March and November. From 2019 to 2023, Jupiter and Saturn were fighting for first place in the moon race. In 2019, Saturn surpassed Jupiter with the discovery of 20 new moons. This took the count to 82 for Saturn and 79 for Jupiter. Just a few years later, in February 2023, Jupiter took the lead with 12 new moons, beating Saturn's 83 moons at the time. Only a short time later, still in 2023, the same astronomers who discovered the recent 128 moons discovered 62 moons orbiting Saturn. This placed the ringed planet firmly in the lead. Elsewhere in the Solar System, Earth has one moon, Mars has two, Jupiter has 95, Uranus has 28 and Neptune has 16, for a total of 142 moons. We only need to discover ten more moons around Saturn to give it double the number of all the other planets combined. The newly discovered moons are all small. Each one is only a few kilometres across. If something that small can be a moon, what really counts as a moon? NASA tells us 'naturally formed bodies that orbit planets are called moons', but even asteroids can have moons. We crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid's moon in 2022. Earth has had a few mini-moons, some only a couple of metres in size. The line of what is and isn't a moon is a bit hazy. Moons orbiting planets in the Solar System can be either 'regular' or 'irregular'. The new moons are all irregular. Regular moons are formed around a planet at the same time as the planet itself forms. Irregular moons are thought to be small planets (planetesimals) that are captured by a planet as it finishes forming. They are then broken into pieces by collisions. Regular moons tend to orbit their planets in nice, circular orbits around the equator. Irregular moons typically orbit in big ovals further away from planets, and at a range of angles. Saturn has 24 regular moons and 250 irregular moons. Studying these moons can tell us about how moons form, and reveal clues about how the Solar System formed and evolved. Saturn's rings are made of small chunks of ice and rock. Astronomers think they formed out of pieces of comets, asteroids and moons that were torn apart by Saturn's gravity. So for Saturn in particular, irregular moons can tell us more about the formation of its beautiful rings. Names of astronomical objects are governed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Originally, all moons in the Solar System were given names from Greco-Roman mythology. But the large number of moons, particularly of Saturn and Jupiter, means the IAU has expanded to giants and gods from other mythology. And it's all about the details. If binary moons are discovered, they are required to be given names of twins or siblings. Saturn's first seven moons were given numbers instead of names. In 1847, John Herschel named them after the Greek Titans. After they ran out of titans and Greek mythological giants, they expanded the naming system to include Inuit and Gallic gods and Norse giants. Discoverers get to suggest names for moons, and the names they suggest are given priority by the IAU. In the past, there have been competitions to name new moons of Jupiter and Saturn. With 128 new moons for Saturn, it might take a while to come up with names that follow the IAU rules. Maybe we'll even see the addition of different mythologies. We'll have to wait and see. Until then, each moon has a name made of a string of numbers and letters, such as 'S/2020 S 27'. Without a solid definition of what a moon is, it's hard to say when (or if) we will ever finish finding them. Everyone agrees we shouldn't call every single chunk of rock in Saturn's rings a moon, but exactly where to draw the line isn't clear. That said, there is probably a limit to the number of moon-like objects astronomers are likely to want to add to the list. Edward Ashton, who led the discovery of the new moons, doesn't think we'll be finding too many new moons until our technology improves.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn
Quantitatively upstaging Earth's guest appearance of a second moon this fall, a recent study found that Saturn has 128 new moons in its orbit. Astronomers confirmed this discovery on March 11, officially bringing Saturn's total amount of moons to 274 – according to NASA. Not that it was ever a competition, but if it was, this discovery means Saturn nearly doubled its already-winning odds. The second planet with the most amount of moons is Jupiter, with 95 recorded in its orbit. A report by the New York Times said these moons were possibly formed by 'cosmic smashups' that sent debris into Saturn's orbit about 100 million years ago. 'Many of these moons are rocks only a few miles across – small compared with our moon, which is 2,159 miles across,' explained the report. 'But as long as they have trackable orbits around their parent body, the scientists who catalog objects in the solar system consider them to be moons.' A team of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, France and the U.S. first discovered Saturn's new batch of moons in 2023, according to The moons were ratified in March 2025 by the International Astronomical Union. The NYTimes explained how, through using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, this team 'observed patches of space near Saturn, and over time this allowed them to track the motion of previously unknown moons.' NYTimes spoke with a member of the team, Edward Ashton, who explained that they needed to prove the objects were in orbit around the planet. The report noted that Ashton, who will have naming rights for these objects, was also responsible for finding 62 new moons of Saturn two years ago. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
